At the height of the Irish Famine, now considered the greatest social
disaster to strike nineteenth-century Europe, Anglo-Irish landlord Major
Denis Mahon was assassinated as he drove his carriage through his
property in County Roscommon. Mahon had already removed 3,000 of his
12,000 starving tenants by offering some passage to America aboard
disease-ridden "coffin ships," giving others a pound or two to leave
peaceably, and sending the sheriff to evict the rest. His murder sparked
a sensation and drove many of the world's most powerful leaders, from
the queen of England to the pope, to debate its meaning. Now, for the
first time, award-winning journalist Peter Duffy tells the story of this
assassination and its connection to the cataclysm that would forever
change Ireland and America.